links for 2006-10-17

Recent Ship Positions on San Francisco Bay (tags: travel visualization) Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI (tags: WordPress comments blog) VerseLogic » WordPress OpenID Plugin (tags: wordpress openid) Music from the TV Series “House” Why don’t studios actually publish this sort of thing? (tags: house music television) Jeep Grand Cherokee WJ – Factory audio components removal

Unmasked

I don’t know quite when I began reading blogs. Almost certainly three to five years ago. The advent of RSS and news aggregators definitely helped that, making the phenomenon about the content and not about visiting a lot of web sites. Two blogs I started reading early on are written by women, each creating an intensely personal chronicle of each life, often with a resolution of minutes. As I thought about it, it amazed me that each one, in the face of identity theft, stalkers, rapists, and general inconsiderate behaviour these two were maintaining their privacy. They were doing so despite their sharing information with the anonymous world. Is this possible? Can privacy be sustained by a blogger? I haven’t …

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links for 2006-10-16

plaintxt.org · Minimalism in blogging: an experiment out of control Following Scott Adams’ Financial Advice? (by Jeremy Zawodny) (tags: financial money) Flickr Photo Download: The Lighthouse (tags: backgrounds)

Sudo

xkcd.com has a wonderful cartoon: (I picked this up via 37signals)

What an Installer Should Do

Certainly many of you have seen my rants about installers that don’t do a very good job of installing. I must extend props to the EA/Dice guys for doing the right thing with the Battlefield 2142 installer when it encounters a version of Windows it doesn’t know about: It warns you and then lets you continue. Which means that, unlike other retarded installers, I can actually play Battlefield 2142 on my Windows Server 2003 desktop machine. Thank you, whoever built this installer.

My Favorite Problem Reports

“Hey, there was a problem this afternoon with the application mail relay.” I adore anecdotal problem reports. Oh, there was a problem with the mail server? I’m sure I can find it in the 546,291 log entries for today. “Did you happen to note the error message?” I reply. “Would that help?” No. Error messages are just annoyances, and never to be recorded for troubleshooting. “Yeah, that’d be handy. Or, maybe you could tell me what time the error occurred.” “Hmmm, okay.” …two hours pass… “The error occurred again.” “What was the error?” “I don’t know but it’s happening on all of our web servers.” “You know, that’s actually the most helpful thing you’ve said.” There are really only three …

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A Shabby Updater

I am not sure what the Apple Software Update is supposed to do, but it doesn’t seem like it works. Hmmm. So why does this window say there is new software available? Ah, yes, I see why there’s new software. iTunes has an update: I hope Apple Software Update can update itself.

ESX Server 3.0.1 & VirtualCenter 2.0.1

A) Amen. I’ve been waiting for these releases. ESX 3.0 and VC 2.0 have some rough edges, and from the looks of the release notes it’s a lot of rough edges. B) The documentation isn’t super clear about how to upgrade. Though, it isn’t like I read the docs real carefully. 🙂 For VirtualCenter it’s just like any other VC upgrade. Download, update everything, don’t delete your database. For ESX Server you should download the “ESX Server 3.0.1 Upgrade Package from earlier releases of ESX Server 3” option. – Get it to your ESX Server (scp, magic, whatever you like) – “tar xlzf 3.0.1-32039-full.tgz” – “cd 32039/” – “esxupdate update” It’ll automatically reboot the ESX Server, so look out. Hey …

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